Old /boot, Grub, FC3

[Mikkel L. Ellertson]

Nick Geovanis <n-geovanis at northwestern.edu> wrote:
> I can't yet tell if this is a Grub issue or FC3 or something else; don't
> think I've had this difficulty before:
> 
> Have an HP Pavilion 6630 (old, 500MHz), it has a two-channel IDE
> controller. FC3 is already installed on channel A, which it calls ide0,
> with a WD drive as master and an older Samsung CD drive as slave. IDE
> channel B is empty. I want some extra disk space, so I put a former FC3
> boot/root/installation drive on channel B to build new filesystems;
> nothing on it I want to save. Rebooting the machine, Grub chokes when it
> finds the old partition labelled /boot on the newly-installed drive cabled
> to channel B. The logs show that FC3 booted and configured both IDE
> channels as ide0 and ide1, and found all three drives, but then it got
> confused and tried to mount non-existent partitions, ended-up losing /usr,
> etc. It manages to bring-up a login prompt and I can login as root but
> loads of important stuff isn't mounted, etc. Brain damage.
> 
> The BIOS boot order hasn't changed. Do I need to make sure that the
> newly-installed drive doesn't have an old MBR? Or is there a Grub
> parameter that circumvents this? Thanks.
> 
A couple of points here. First of all, it is not Grub that is having
the problem. All Grub does is load the kernel, and the initial RAM
disk. After that, the kernel takes over, and mounts the root file
system. It then starts init. (Unless you override it and tell it to
start another process on the command line.)  From here, a bunch of
scripts are run, normally starting with /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit and
/etc/rc.d/rc.

Now, you can not directly tell the system to ignore the file systems
on the new drive without disabling the drive all together. But there
are a couple of things you can do. One is to boot the system by
passing the kernel "init=/bin/bash" on the command line. You will
end up with only the root directory mounted, and with a command
prompt. You can then ether delete the partition table or remove
the labels from the partitions.

But because you are able to boot the system, and you do not want
to save anything from the added drive, it may be easier to change
to run level 1, unmount any partitions that were mounted from the
second drive, and use fdisk to delete the partition table.

telinit 1
fdisk /dev/hdc
o
w
shutdown -r now

Mikkel
-- 

  Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!